The computing industry has seen many advances in recent years, and such advances have produced a multitude of products and services. Computing systems have also seen many changes, including their virtualization. Virtualization of computer resources generally connotes the abstraction of computer hardware, which essentially separates operating systems and applications from direct correlation to specific hardware. Hardware is therefore abstracted to enable multiple operating systems and applications to access parts of the hardware, defining a seamless virtual machine. The result of virtualization is that hardware is more efficiently utilized and leveraged.
The advent of virtualization has sparked a number of technologies, which allow companies to optimize the utilization of their systems. As a company's enterprise systems are usually installed at various geographic locations, networking protocols are used to interconnect the various systems, which can then be virtualized into one or more virtual servers.
Resource management of the system has become increasingly important, especially with regard to the updates and patches regularly run for the system. Currently, the hardware capacity for the numerous enterprise systems is not considered in providing an update. That is, a conservative approach is generally taken where a fixed number of updates is specified, irrespective of the capacity of the hardware resources available. In addition, there is no feedback during the update process as the updates are provided through an open loop system. Consequently, the update process cannot be tuned during the process in order to react to changes in resource availability. These changes can impact the performance as the systems are providing real application performance during the update.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for methods, systems and computer implemented processes that provide for more efficient update techniques for an enterprise system.